Free Highway To Hell by Alex Laybourne Page B

death himself had come out tonight to claim him. Not that Graham cared: he was ready to go, had been ever since his wife died and the government shoved him into a nursing home. He had been more than capable of looking after himself, still would have been if not for the disease – he was only seventy-six, for God’s sake. They wanted to sell his home and build some cheap houses to give to all the fucking foreigners. Graham had no living relatives and so was an easy target. Within seven months of entering the home he was confined to his 8x5 cell, or ‘room’ as they all called it. It was en suite, but they insisted on giving him a commode in the corner to use. He wasn’t allowed to walk anywhere, instead wheeled him to and from the dining room where frozen TV dinners were served lukewarm at best. To top it off, twice a day Graham was transported into the recreation room, which was a plain whitewashed room with large windows that overlooked a supposed garden and fish pond but which looked more like an overgrown wasteland with a large muddy puddle in the center. There were no fish in the pond, that was a certainty, and the only thing that ever dared enter the garden was the occasional bird, but it wouldn’t stay long. Nothing ever stayed in Golden Acres nursing home long. There were a few bright pictures on the far wall, modern art they called it, but to Graham it looked more like the artist had farted while painting something else and that by-product of his misdirected bodily function had been the better piece. The other occupants of the recreational room were just as exciting, either parked in front of the television, which seemed to broadcast nothing but old black and white movies, as though people over a certain age watched nothing else. Graham couldn’t remember the last time he had seen the news or read a newspaper. It looked and felt, to him at least, not like a retirement home but a hideaway, a pre-burial storage compound. Food and water was given and they were just left to wait for their clock to run down. Now, lying in the darkness, hearing the footsteps of an invisible enemy, Graham looked back on it all with no feelings other than a strange and consoling acceptance. A readiness, willingness to go with the strange visitor regardless of what it held in store for a man who had killed the Germans with a song in his heart, before teaching children for the majority of his life, including more than just a few of German descent. He wondered then, for the first time, if any of them still had their grandparents at that time, or had he taken them away from them? Then again, wasn’t that why he became a teacher, to educate, to stop kids rushing off and joining the military simply because it was the easy option, the safe bet that if you failed in your studies you could still go away and be the best that you could be?
    Something moved in the corner of the room, to the left of the door. It was his chariot; a worn out wheelchair. Its rusty wheels creaked, its carriage moved back and forth as if some hidden weight had taken a seat, testing it out for after he had passed.
    “Who’s there? I know your there?” he croaked, his body objecting by starting a chain reaction that began with a violent coughing fit and ended up with a mouthful of bloody phlegm being spat into a basin positioned on the floor beside the bed for that very purpose.
    “It’s me, Sarge. Edwards,” a scared voice answered him. It wasn’t a physical sound but rather a whisper carried on a breath of wind. In fact Graham doubted he had heard anything at all, only it was that name… Edwards, why had he heard that name?
    Graham couldn’t speak further; he was too exhausted, and his body racked with pain. His every muscle ached as it fought just to take the next breath, to see a sunrise that he couldn’t be bothered to see. Ever since his wife died Graham had asked for death, begged for it, yet it was years before the cancer took hold of him, and now not